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Edward Maria Wingfield (1550–1631)

Edward Maria Wingfield was a
founding member of the Virginia
Company of London and the first president of the Council of Virginia, a group of Jamestown settlers
appointed by the company to make local decisions for the colony. Born into a
political and military family, Wingfield followed his uncle Jaques Wingfield to
Ireland and spent many years fighting there during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He studied
law briefly, fought the Spanish in the Low Countries, returned to Ireland, and served
in Parliament before retiring from military service in 1600. From then on he focused
on colonization, helping his cousin Bartholomew Gosnold recruit members for the
proposed colony in Virginia.
Unlike most of the original investors named in the First Charter, Wingfield actually traveled to
Virginia and served as the colony's first president. Wingfield was unable to keep the
peace among the settlement's leaders—he and Captain John Smith clashed repeatedly—and he was deposed
as president and sent back to England. There he wrote his Discourse on
Virginia, defending himself against attacks and providing a valuable
description of the colony's origins. He died in 1631, having remained active in the
Virginia Company's efforts. MORE...

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Early Years

Wingfield was born in 1550 at Stoneley Priory, near Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire,
England, the son of Thomas Maria Wingfield and his wife Margaret Kay. Thomas
Wingfield, a member of Parliament who belonged to a well-established political and
military family, died in 1557, and in 1562 Margaret Wingfield married James Creuse
(also spelled Cruwys and Crewes), who became the adolescent Edward's guardian.
Wingfield was raised as a Protestant; the "Maria" in Edward's and Thomas's names
honored their godmother, King Henry VIII's sister Mary Tudor.

As he came to manhood, Wingfield was the
protégé of his father's brother Jaques Wingfield (d. 1587), who was heavily
involved in the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, serving as Master of Ordnance in
Ireland, as Constable of Dublin Castle, and as a member of the Irish Privy
Council. In 1569 Wingfield accompanied his uncle to Ireland in order to assist him
in the plantation of the province of Munster. In this capacity, he likely
encountered Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir John Popham, who would later become major
figures in the early English attempts at colonization in North America.

Wingfield appears to have remained in Ireland until 1576, when he went to London
and was admitted to the legal training program at Lincoln's Inn. He left the Inn,
however, before completing his studies there, and, in company with his brother
Thomas Wingfield, served as a captain of foot in the Low Countries, fighting in
support of the Protestant Dutch Republic against Spanish Catholic forces. In 1588
he, along with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a future settler of New England, was taken
prisoner by the Spanish at Bergen-op-Zoom, and was held first at Ghent and then at
Lille until he and Gorges gained their release through a prisoner-of-war exchange
in June 1589.

Wingfield briefly returned to England in
1593, when his friend and neighbor Anthony Mildmay secured him a seat in
Parliament, representing Chippenham, Wiltshire, but he played little role in the
House of Commons. In the 1590s Wingfield also returned to military service in
Ireland, although scholars disagree about which years he was there. He spent
several years in the English garrison at Drogheda, where the muster-master was Sir
Ralph Lane, who a few years earlier had played an important role in the Roanoke colonies sponsored by
Sir Walter Raleigh. He
also served at the garrison at Dundalk. In 1600 he took up an appointment as a
feoffee, or governor, of Kimbolton School, near Stoneley Priory.

The Virginia Company of London

By this time, Wingfield was well into
middle age, but healthy and energetic. As a man with many years of military
experience, accustomed to life outside England, he was an attractive recruit when
his second cousin Bartholomew Gosnold sought investment in the newly organized
Virginia Company of London. Wingfield, then retired from active military service,
threw himself wholeheartedly into raising funds for an expedition to North
America, and, because of his extensive network of wealthy friends and family
members, achieved considerable success. In partnership with Gosnold, he recruited
about forty of the men and boys who would make up the voyage's personnel, drawing them
largely from the ranks of younger sons of the gentry. On April 10, 1606,
Wingfield, along with Richard Hakluyt (the younger), Sir Thomas Gates, and Sir George Somers, became a patentee of the
Virginia Company of London. Of these men, Wingfield was the only one to
immediately make the voyage to Virginia himself, making him both an "adventurer"
who raised funds and a "venturer" who went to sea. On December 20, 1606, Wingfield
joined the convoy of three small ships, the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and
the Godspeed, under the overall command of Captain Christopher
Newport, and set sail from London's Blackwall Dock.

Gaining and Losing Power

Although Newport was in command of the
voyage, the Virginia Company had decreed in an order dated November 20, 1606,
that once the ships reached Virginia Newport was to open a small box, which
contained a list of settlers to be members of the settlement's governing council.
This was accomplished on April 26, 1607, following landfall, and Wingfield,
Newport, Gosnold, John Smith, John Martin, John Ratcliffe, and George Kendall were
all appointed to the Council. The Virginia Company had further stipulated that the
councillors forebear selecting a president until they had decided on a site of
settlement. On May 12, Wingfield designated a site approximately fifty miles
upriver as the locus of settlement, and named it Jamestown in honor of King James I. The following day,
the councillors elected Wingfield as their president, in what has been referred to
as the first democratic election held in British America. Although Wingfield had
clashed with Smith in the course of the voyage, and at the age of fifty-seven was
significantly older than his fellow councillors, he was in many ways the obvious
choice for this position, because of his important role in the establishment of
the Virginia Company and his extensive experience not only in military matters,
but also in plantation ventures in Ireland.

Although Wingfield had initially been a
popular, even an obvious, choice for the leadership of the settlement, he soon
aroused controversy among his fellow settlers. He and Smith (who had been denied
his seat on the Council, largely because of Newport's and Wingfield's mistrust of
him) continued to clash, both in terms of personality and on issues of military
strategy against the Virginia Indians of Tsenacomoco. Wingfield's fellow colonizers were
impressed when his leadership was instrumental in repelling a fierce Indian attack
against the newly erected Jamestown Fort on May 26, but as the summer went on the
settlers, many of whom were unaccustomed to hard labor, became increasingly
unhappy with the diminishing food supplies, ongoing Indian attacks, oppressively
hot weather, and Wingfield's harsh disciplinary regimen.

On September 10, the surviving settlers deposed Wingfield from the presidency of
the Council, charging him with a number of offenses, including hoarding food,
having secret sympathies with Spain's imperial ambitions in North America, and
being an atheist. The former president was imprisoned in the Discovery, where he remained until January 1608, when Newport returned to
Jamestown from a voyage to England. Newport ordered that Wingfield then be moved
inside the fort, in company with Smith, who had been sentenced to hang after
losing two settlers to the Indians. Newport released both men, but he did not move
to reinstate Wingfield as president, as the charge of atheism was sufficiently
serious that it was necessary that Wingfield return to England to face trial. On
April 10, 1608, Wingfield returned to England with Newport, and never returned to
the Virginia colony.

Later Years

After his return to England, Wingfield wrote a long response to the various
charges against him and, in particular, convinced the Crown that the charge of
atheism was a groundless one concocted by disaffected Jamestown settlers; he was
set free. Despite the traumatic nature of his departure from Virginia, Wingfield
spent much of the rest of his life involved in the colony's affairs, including
raising funds and sending supplies for the Jamestown venture. He died at Kimbolton
in 1631, and on April 13 was buried there at Saint Andrew's parish church. In the nineteenth century
scholars rediscovered his manuscript detailing his experiences in Virginia, which
was first published in 1859 as A Discourse of Virginia.

For many years, Wingfield was viewed quite unfavorably in terms of his conduct as
Jamestown, not only because of his removal from the presidency, but also because
John Smith described him in such negative terms in his extensive and widely
circulated commentaries on the early years of the Virginia colony. In retrospect,
Wingfield was probably too old to provide effective leadership to a group of boys
and men who were mostly in their teens and twenties, and while his severity as a
disciplinarian may have been effective among soldiers, it aroused significant
hostility among the settlers.

Many of the problems that Jamestown endured in its first months, however, such as
Indian hostility, exceptionally hot and dry weather, and a scarcity of food, were
neither Wingfield's fault nor within his control. Moreover, his choice of an
easily defensible site for the first settlement and his knowledge of effective
processes of fort-building contributed to the colony's ability to survive its
difficult early years. Wingfield's Discourse of Virginia,
although insistent in its justifications of his actions, provides a crucial
eyewitness account of the first year of the Jamestown settlement, supplementing
John Smith's better-known narrative.

Time Line

1550
- Edward Maria Wingfield is born at Stoneley Priory, near Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire, England, to Thomas Maria Wingfield and his wife Margaret Kay.

1605–1606
- Edward Maria Wingfield and his cousin Bartholomew Gosnold recruit approximately forty boys and men as participants in the planned expedition to Virginia.

April 10, 1606
- King James I grants the Virginia Company a royal charter dividing the North American coast between two companies, the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth, overseen by the "Counsell of Virginia," whose thirteen members are appointed by the king.

December 20, 1606
- Three ships carrying 104 settlers sail from London bound for Virginia. Christopher Newport captains the Susan Constant, Bartholomew Gosnold the Godspeed, and John Ratcliffe the Discovery.

April 26, 1607
- Jamestown colonists first drop anchor in the Chesapeake Bay, and after a brief skirmish with local Indians, begin to explore the James River.

May 13, 1607
- The Jamestown colonists select a marshy peninsula fifty miles up the James River on which to establish their settlement.

May 26, 1607
- While Christopher Newport and a party of colonists explore the James River, an alliance of five Algonquian-speaking Indian groups—the Quiyoughcohannocks, the Weyanocks, the Appamattucks, the Paspaheghs, and the Chiskiacks—attacks Jamestown, wounding ten and killing two.

September 10, 1607
- Council members John Ratcliffe, John Smith, and John Martin oust Edward Maria Wingfield as president, replacing him with Ratcliffe. By the end of the month, half of Jamestown's 104 men and boys are dead, mostly from sickness.

April 10, 1608
- Aboard the John and Francis, Christopher Newport leaves Jamestown for England. Among those with him are Gabriel Archer, Edward Maria Wingfield, and the Indian Namontack.